Exascale Report Relays Flap from Intel's ISC Press Conference

The latest issue of The Exascale Report is out with interesting grumblings from the community about Intel’s recent announcement of exascale leadership. Personally, I came away from the press event (watch insideHPC’s exclusive video here) with a much stronger sense of clarity as to where the company wants to go by 2018, but others quoted in the article were highly critical:

Intel has yet to demonstrate a deep and credible plan to get to exascale. This [announcement] is about claiming ‘turf’ and is more of a strategic move for Intel – in an attempt to keep any of their major customers and partners from defecting to AMD or NVIDIA in search of longer-term exascale capabilities. Intel still has not been able to adequately address the interconnect issue – and that’s become a rather sensitive topic for them.”

There are also two really insightful audio interviews in this issue – one with IBM’s Don Grice (who is rumored to be the one taking over for Alan Gara as chief architect for Blue Gene), and one with Wilf Pinfold from Intel. Wilf is currently the Director of Extreme Scale Programs with Intel’s labs, but many of us know him from his role as the General Chair of SC09.

Resource Links:

Latest Video

Industry Perspectives

In this Nvidia podcast, Bryan Catanzaro from Baidu describes how machines with Deep Learning capabilities are now better at recognizing objects in images than humans. “AI gets better and better until it kind of disappears into the background,” says Catanzaro — NVIDIA’s head of applied deep learning research — in conversation with host Michael Copeland on this week’s edition of the new AI Podcast. “Once you stop noticing that it’s there because it works so well — that’s when it’s really landed.” [Read More...]

White Papers

This white paper reviews common HPC-environment challenges and outlines solutions that can help IT professionals deliver best-in-class HPC cloud solutions—without undue stress and organizational chaos.